Restless Spirit Blog
RS Blog 169
2019
The Origin of this blog and it's transformation into shining a greater light onto the abuse and corruption that runs rampant in Indian Country. The culprits are in every level of government. They are what ails us all, regardless of where we live, or who we are. Judging from events at the national & state levels, We Are ALL Indians Now. This is about them, and this is about us––ALL of us.
Richard LaFuente served almost 30 years for a crime he did not commit, while the real killers roamed free, and still do, to this day.
Everything we suffer now, all the suffering we see now, has roots in our untold history. We can't know what we weren't taught unless we are willing to open our minds to the simple logic that "Nothing JUST happens."
The greatest injustices have fallen upon Indigenous People the world over, and upon minorities in our very midst. Unless we are willing to take on and hold accountable those who commit these injustices and those who profit from them as well as those who created the system that makes ongoing injustice "routine", we will never know Peace in our lifetime, anywhere in this world.
It's time to QUESTION AUTHORITY and hold accountable those in power and those who benefit from a system designed by "leaders" to be unfair, unjust, and costly to all of us. This is not happening to "other" people, it is happening to People. WE ARE PEOPLE.
Those in power will always aim our anger at someone else, even less powerful. Until we see others as equal to ourself, we will never know the true power of Unity, nor the Peace of living in a Just World.
Introduction: The same corrupt system that wrongly accused, convicted and imprisoned eleven innocent young men is the same system, with many of the exact same players, who are currently profiting from rampant sexual abuse of children on Spirit Lake Nation Reservation in North Dakota, as well as most if not all reservations in Indian Country, and beyond.
This Blog is documenting ongoing events at all levels of government. Events on the rez itself, often require someone to speak up and speak out, but since those who do are often abused, assaulted, threatened and intimidated by the abusers in authority, this blog is their voice.
I ignore morons but the rest of you can reach me at: Cat West Email
NOTICE
This is the NEW model Blog. Not all the links hook up to pages that are also smart phone/tablet friendly. Eventually, they all will be, but with over 5000 pages on this site, it may take some time to get everything on the raft.
November 25, 2019
The Collision of Worlds Happens in Silence –– Print (6)
The Ancient, The Old, The New, The Forgotten…
The Genocide, the Survivors, the Famous and the Frauds…
The Liars, The Truthtellers,
The Truth…
The Lies…
The Predators, the Vulnerable…
The Advocates, The Warriors…
The Inequity
The Broken Treaties, Empty Promises…
All collide in Indian Country.
The losses suffered, the generations lost to exploitation, greed, Murder and theft….
All churn and stir in a restless dance around fires of hope, and depths of dark despair.
We did this. We built this. This is our work. We didn’t learn from the wisdom that was available, we pursued missions of greed and genocide, and never spoke of it in the curriculum or even in the social circles, spun for our advancement. Status Badge Achieved.
We have protected the ignorance that ignored the crimes committed in the name of our progress and our future constructed itself on fragile piles of legends created by, for and about cowards painted as heroic, when they were Human Failures. We thought we needed to believe these things in order to not feel shame. We should be ashamed.
We cover our shame with blindness, not looking at where it all began and where to this day it continues, to our detriment.
We got into this mess because we pursued the path of Lies, Dishonor and Ignorance.
Those who speak the Truth now are the most at risk. There is no room. All the weapons are brought to bear, and they become targets. Our nation suffers from the ills we inflicted on Indians, and we think this is something new? Only new in that we never thought what we allowed to happen to others would happen to us. Welcome to the collision.
Abduction of Africa’s People, to be chained into forced labors, tortures, dehumanizing acts upon them as if the profits generated, the nation they built was always ours by right, is a wrong we have yet to reckon with.
The pursuit of diminishing others by gender, by sexuality, by religion… as the corruption that thrives on our ignorance and keeps us divided requires in order that the ruling class can go unseen, and pay nothing for the privileges they hoard, not even taxes are required of them, and we are stunned by the violence in our communities, the Media Monopolies portraying us as unable to discern fact from fiction, opinion from sheer idiocy, and how dare we not consider all sides valid when Science is opposed by stupidity, and debated by panels of the unqualified, celebrities instead of experts, pundits instead of scholars…
How did we get this way? How did we arrive at such a swarming of idiocy while Russia continues to threaten our Democracy from within, China takes our abandoned allies, and now the world again dances on the crumbling precipice of Climate Collapse? How did we get here?
By apathy and ignorance.
How do we get out?
I don’t know if we can, but I know we must try. We must daily seek the truth, review elements of our history that misled us and correct that path. We must support Truth Tellers, not watch them battle and fall alone, as if some game, as if the coliseum and we are merely in the stands.
We must become more and more proactive. We must speak up. We must stand up while we can stand up.
The lies we were told did not make us stronger, they installed in our generations, weaknesses that can now be exploited by those who gained power by exploiting the vulnerable, stealing resources and most of all, because they suffered no consequences, the injustices were perpetuated from Contact to Present.
What the Opposition fears now, and why they are going all in against Justice, is they fear consequences for their crimes, the loss of their ill-gotten wealth. They fear the Truth. They fear Fairness and Equality and Equity, because that begins to balance the society, strengthen us all, and that makes it harder for them to steal, rape, pillage with impunity.
All worlds collided in silence, a long time ago, in the midst of our nation as we were becoming… and now, the crashing of Truth and Lies, the Conflicts of Right & Wrong, Good & Evil, are becoming Noise and Turmoil.
Our discomfort is in what we see happening now. Our greater fear is what preceded it, and what we will learn and what heroes and pillars of our society will be revealed for their predation and what victims will surface, their blood and bones, contaminating the view of our false righteousness, a mess we have to clean up.
Moreover, I suspect, strongly suspect, that our greatest trepidation is a fear that we will win. And when we do, we’ll have to rebuild everything, discarding what we thought were heroes, and revealing the abuses of religions we thought guided our morals… we’ve known for hundreds of years that the Church has been raping our children, stealing our wealth, and shaming us for questioning them, shaming us for our imperfections.
We’re going to have to buy into something new. Something real. Something that unites us as Human Beings, and which bestows upon all of us, the Dignity of being treated as Human Beings. We have to rebuild. We can’t keep patching up a flawed system of lies, ignorance, power and exploitation.
I think we will like ourselves better. I think it will make us stronger. I think it will open an age of progress and Peace Through True Strength, and Security based on a foundation of Justice, Fairness and Wisdom.
We have the ingredients. We’ve always had them. We just have to use our greatest strengths of unity, and forego the processes of ego wherein no wrongs are admitted, no lessons learned.
I spent years warning that the system in place that oppressed Indian Country for the benefit of the Rich and Powerful, would someday come to take us all. We are presently in that battle. Nobody is immune. Those who think they are, will either wake up before it’s too late, or they won’t. They don’t want to. Our time and energy must be invested in the warriors who bring the truth, and the methods to oppose oppressors and oppression, everywhere.
Countries all over the world are facing long-term, still ongoing demonstration against oppression. Millions are in the streets. Violence is brought by the powerful who control the police, and the demonstrations are misrepresented or ignored entirely by the Monopolized Media that doesn’t want us to get any ideas… Seek the Truth. See for yourself.
Monopolies must be dismantled so our economy can survive.
Billionaires are not our friends. They did not ‘earn’ that money, they took it by paying substandard wages for decades. Tax Breaks benefit the wealthiest. A direct rise in Homelessness and violence corresponds with the steepest tax breaks, that render our social safety nets for the most vulnerable, in tatters.
Taxes aren’t bad. They just aren’t fair. Taxes need to be made more fair. Prisons and Hospitals, Schools and mental institutions should not be For Profit or Private. We should all be entitled to basic services to save our lives, allow us to improve our lives, and keep society safer.
When a broken arm can bankrupt a family, we have injustice built into the system.
When education requires a level of debt that you can’t dig out of for 30 years that keeps you from owning property, building your own wealth.
When prisons are built for profit, and which benefits from slave labors of inmates, many of whom are incarcerated because of an injustice in our legal systems, we create poverty, violence and rising national debt.
Fairness, Equality, Justice are not threats to our society, but are portrayed as evil by those who have benefited, often for generations, from the injustices, inequality and unfairness built into the system. The ignorance required to participate in that dynamic is forwarded by Monopolized Media that makes celebrities out of people spouting the stupidest stuff, and we should hold them accountable for the false narratives they create that is to our detriment.
Those telling the Truth are Warriors. Those fighting Evils of Injustice are Warriors.
The voices of Hate and intolerance will fade into a dying echo, swarmed by the songs of Peace and Freedom, never to rise again. Those who sell you Hate use the coin of Ignorance & weakness to close the deal. Generations have bought into it, and we are the more bankrupt for it.
You’ve already picked a side with your silence, as you watch these worlds collide, as if it were just a game.
You know where to find me.
~Cat
Top of Page
November 18, 2019
It Starts at the Cellular Level Print (7)
Dream interpretation works best when dreams are used to help us identify problems, potential dangers, and even remedies in our lives, by identifying symbols in the dreams as they relate to the dreamer on Mental, Emotional, Physical, Spiritual levels.
Example: Dreams of being in a house is often the dreamer’s own body. If there are plumbing problems, well, time to look at how the dreamer’s own digestive, renal system is working. The dream of looking at someone else’s house is a bit trickier because it can mean you’re looking at someone else’s health issues. Dreams of cities can indicate family history issues or community issues, etc. .
We speak a language of symbols and symbolism when we are talking to ourselves. Think about it: We don’t spell out words when we speak, we say whole words. Those words weave into a shape, a fabric if you will, that shapes our sense of self.
In a sense, our bodies are always communicating to us, but we don’t hear it or even understand it because it’s a language we are told is useless. People tell us that “It’s only a dream” as if dreams themselves have no value, when in fact, it is dreams that create our world, and build our future world. Collectively, we are living in a world that first came through dreams.
Every cell in our body, every neuron in our nerve system, is speaking to us. From the Cellular Level on up. If we learned enough about these symbols, maybe, just maybe, we could recognize dangers before they take over, such as Cancer or mental illness, or prevent crisis before they completely manifest, by learning the signs of what is coming, what is upon us, or even what is programed into our genes, and what therefore, we must be vigilant in monitoring lest it manifest into a health issue for the body, and for our lives.
Living in A Nightmare
Just as dreams reflect our physical, spiritual and mental health issues, so does the world around us reflect the systems that run the cogs that rule our lives. The sicknesses in our society manifest themselves in the form of poverty, addiction, violence, oppression and the cancer in these cases, the cause of all these ailments in the body of our society? Corruption.
Corruption infects every level of every system, of every system of government on the planet. It’s now at the cellular level. It’s in our schools starting with curriculum, our PTA’s where parents who don’t have to work two & three jobs to make ends meet, decide how our schools treat students and teach students in ways that keep the advantage of White, Male (Patriarchy) and Christian, our markets where hiring and pay are based on gender and race, and in some communities, religion, and in our social circles where we segregate by wealth, race, religion.
Look at how our laws are applied. If you are a multi-billion dollar company such as FED-EX, you literally pay ZERO taxes. The burden shifts to the poor to pay more. Paying more when you have less to begin with, is how the wealth gap widens. It insures a cycle of poverty that knocks more people down rather than helping more people to lift themselves out.
That dynamic serves to create almost everything that ails us as a society and as a nation. The wealthiest have the attention of those we elect to make our laws. The wealthiest are in a position to protect their wealth at the expense of the poorest.
All the poors have is their vote. And now, with the voting irregularities, the machines that flip votes, the machines that mark ballots with a barcode that no voter can read, along with the gerrymandering and the abrupt purging of registered voters where literally, hundreds of thousands of legally registered voters, are suddenly showing up to vote and find they cannot vote because some flawed system that allowed them to be removed and therefore have no voice in the foundation of a system that rules every aspect of their lives. Funny how 99% of purged voters only happens with Republican Secretaries of States, and those purged are disproportionately Black and Democrats.
Multi levels of disempowerment literally cripple our system, make it lean heavily in favor of those with wealth and power. It creates an imbalance that is self-perpetuating. Imbalance in a system is how we get violence, addictions, and media portrayals of those who suffer from the corrupt taking all, the poor paying all, as “Losers”. The victim is portrayed as the cause of their own suffering.
Example: We see a drunk or an addict staggering and flailing in public, we think: “Get them out of my space! They chose to do this!”
We don’t consider: “They are suffering, they need help, we need to have a system to help them.” We don’t think that because we know we don’t have a system to help them, and in fact, we, Society/Nation, are the cause of these afflictions. We can’t overwhelm ourselves with that because we might question how this imbalance took hold, and what needs to be done to create a more stable balance.
A system more in balance would be healthier for all of us. But we have no control over that system because only the wealthiest steer the legislation that uses our tax dollars, makes our laws, into areas that benefit the wealthiest at the expense of the rest of us.
The people we condemn as “losers” in our midst are actually the living symbols of what is out of balance in our neighborhoods, our States and our Federal Government, and we are unable to interpret that warning for what it is.
We have laws against murder. You murder people by any means: direct violence, poison, staging an ‘accident’, or hiring an assassin, etc., you go to prison. UNLESS you murder hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions…. And you do it for profits: Billions and Billions of dollars in profits. Then, maybe, you pay a fine. See the Sackler Family and their pharma company that not only made Oxycontin, they made it as addicting as possible and misled every medical professional, and then joked about it in their emails and texts to one another.
Someone sells you crack or meth and you die from it, they go to jail. Someone sells you Oxycontin and you become addicted (within a few days or less), you go out and commit crimes to secure more when you are abruptly cut off, or you die from an overdose, they get to buy a few more congress critters, lobby for the laws that let them skate, attend high end fundraisers, and are lauded as “Pillars of Society”, with no real consequences.
Not one member of the Sackler Family has been arrested, even though they are known to be the perpetuators of mass deaths, the cause of these deaths, the cause of the violence in the lives of these addicts, their families and their villages, towns and cities… and even as they move their money into offshore accounts to protect it while they declare bankruptcy, they still get to attend fundraisers for politicians who will, if elected or re-elected, protect them from consequences.
How does this cancer on our system continue to metastasize without us knowing it? Without us being able to cure it? At the cellular level, like all cancers. It quietly invades each cell of our society via different routes but doing the damage just the same.
First, society has been conditioned since Contact, to view other Human Beings as lesser, even as non-Human or sub Human. That makes it okay to hurt them, rob them, deny them access, and deny them Justice for the wrongs done to them. And to deny them the vote in how they are governed and who makes those laws. You don’t have to deny them all, just enough of them to make it overwhelmingly difficult for them to overcome the odds stacked against them. Call them “Lazy”.
The cellular level of the cancer that afflicts our society resides in how we are taught who we are and what our place in this system is. The overwhelmingly White, Male, Christian Centric form of history is a false history by both its omission of a majority of figures that are neither White, Male, nor Christian, and by the “fabulization” or hagiographic adulation attributing to some figures, qualities and accomplishments that they never possessed, never embodied, never contributed to, while omitting the courage, deeds, accomplishments of those who do not fit the White Male Christian template upon which all these narratives are written.
This leads to generations of ingrained ignorance that is tatamount to having a genetic weakness in the body of society that leaves it easily prone to, susceptible to triggers that set off predictable reactions of individuals in groups that do greater and greater damage to our sense of unity and society.
The call for common sense gun laws gets radicalized by those who want to trigger violence by saying that is equal to taking away all guns from all people. That position makes no sense, and yet, there it is, every single time the subject is broached. We’re talking about taking away weapons that are not designed for either hunting or self-defense, but rather a weapon designed for the battlefield that has only one purpose: To kill as many humans as possible in the span of less than a minute.
People don’t understand the Second Amendment, they only parrot the misleading edited version that became the staple of the NRA. The 2A was never intended to allow every citizen every kind of weapon known to exist. There has to be limitations. We can’t have flame throwers, cannons, nuclear weapons, etc. Also, the 2A was written in an age of Muskets. It was specific that because there was no established Military, and that is key, there was NO established Military because we were not yet a Nation, that the men had to be armed and belong to a Well-Organized Militia and Militias were defined as being run by the governors of their States, not by the gang of guys down the road.
If anyone can declare their gang a “Militia” then literally, gangs can declare themselves Militias and make up their own laws and declare themselves immune from State & Federal laws and regulations. But, no one thinks that logical path to its logical conclusion because they are triggered at the cellular level, instilled through generations of misguided, inaccurate, false history in the curriculum of schools. A false history that became more deeply ingrained through media: Movies, TV shows, Books, and the slanted coverage of Newspapers who felt it was necessary to adhere to the template narrative of White, Male, Christian Hero rather than the reality, the truth, and without nuance, so it has been—Since CONTACT.
The built-in prejudices, the genetic flaws if you will, are based on racism. They diverge from that point. Just as cancer needs to turn the body’s cells against itself and treat our cells as if they are not our cells, but invaders, and multiply, so does it work to the benefit of the super wealthy & powerful, to turn us against each other, to treat others like us as if they were invaders of our realm.
The wealthy prefer we only hear legends about their philanthropy, their successes (as if those successes were not predicated on piracy or on cheating, or relying on the labors of slavory, etc.) and to view them as the ideals to which we should all aspire. That’s wrong because the imbalance of wealth in the extreme, which is what we have now, requires that lesser income earners work harder, pay more, have less, acquire more debt. Every system relies on a hierarchy, layers of work division, wealth, investment, and management. That’s how it’s supposed to function. Not everyone makes the same. Not everyone has the same. But everyone has their needs met, and some have greater wealth, others are able to earn or gain more without being burdened with supporting the wealthiest who bleed them of hope, dignity and opportunity.
But when the wealthiest decide they want to pay for nothing while taking everything, the imbalance becomes critical.
Cancer eventually cripples and kills its host body, unless it is stopped, unless it is cured. In order for it to be cured, it has to be recognized for what it is. Ignoring it saves no one.
Ignoring the corruption that favors the wealthiest and hurts the rest of us, cannot be ignored. It was ignored for too long when it was “okay” for it to rob those we were taught were lesser Humans. The “less deserving” were defined as “them”, and Them were defined by race, color, religion, gender, creed…
The cancer that is killing our country has metastasized through every organ of our political system and the cure is to attack it at the cellular level. That’s why you see more people becoming involved in politics and taking over from the Conservative Greed Party, from town councils on up to State and Federal offices, and winning.
The tumors at the top of the Corruption Cancer, are vile, ugly, destructive and menacing to the safety of us all. The tumors at the top didn’t happen overnight. They have been infecting the body politic since Nixon, who was a crook.
The narrative they used to metastasize to other cells featured lies about the other party. The facts were that despite claiming to be the party of Law & Order (a dog whistle to tell White People they will lock up all those “other” people), of fiscal conservatism, and the only Patriots in the game, they are in fact, none of the above.
The party of Law & Order is defying the laws that others must abide by. Refusing to show up to testify when they have been subpoenaed is a clue. The laws do not apply to the corrupt. If we have laws, only the corrupt will ignore them. It works for them. Sort of.
Fiscal Conservatism is another dog whistle that means: “We’ll cut taxes (but only for the wealthiest)” while the taxes for the average worker have gone up while wages have stagnated for decades and the cost of living has skyrocketed. This is the formula that gave us homelessness in the Reagan era. Cut taxes for the wealthy, cut services for the needy, dispossess people from their homes… every tax cut coincides with spikes in homelessness, addiction, violence. But you think those tax cuts to billionaires will trickle down? 40 plus years has proven, that is not how you build a strong economy. You build a strong economy by paying livable wages, a healthy and helpful safety net that helps people get on their feet, not one that throws them out in the cold.
Meanwhile, those tax cuts also raise the debt and the deficit. A fact that is only noticed when Democrats take the helm and begin the process of cutting both by taxing the wealthy, raising wages, and protecting the services that keep people from being dispossessed. And they are villified for it in the media.
Obama had the debt and deficit cut almost in half from what he inherited from W. When George W Bush handed over the reins, our economy was in a death spiral. Jobs were being lost at an alarming 300-840 per month! Notable that during his inauguration, Republican Leaders in the Senate and House both had a meeting at a Mexican Restaurant where they swore that under no circumstances would they vote “yes” on anything proposed by Obama, even if it was their own ideas, even if it was good for the country. And they were proud of throwing up obstacles and opposing every single bill he proposed, or signed. Every single bill.
Since taking office, Trump has exceeded what it was during George W. Bush's term... the one that drove us to the brink of economic ruin. Not a peep from media. Not. A. Peep.
Instead of helping to fix the economic system they had broken, they worked to undermine all efforts to make repairs. They were so opposed to having Affordable Healthcare for average citizens, they voted over 70 times (55 times during Obama’s tenure) to overturn it. This, while their constituents were being served by Doctors Without Borders, in makeshift tents, in communities mostly in the South, where both poverty and Republicans had taken hold since the White Backlash against the Voting Rights Act of 1964, was signed. Racist Dems voted against that Act and became Republicans. Racism has been the foundation of the Republican Party ever since that time.
In order for Republicans to stay in power, they have to keep people in poverty, uneducated, and angry at people just like them, only not the same race, not the same gender, not the same religion… and it has worked. Until the tumors at the top became so obvious, so ugly, we couldn’t help but see them.
That’s where decades of gerrymandering, voter suppression tactics and mechanisms, corrupt courts, and corrupt media stepped in to maintain the status quo of corruption über alles. Media was allowed to monopolize: thousands of outlets in radio, tv, newspapers, magazines, book publishing, movie making… boiled down to what we have today: 6 very White, Very Male, Very Conservative Corporations with Old White Males at the helm, owning all of it. Do you think they won’t slant in their favor in order to save their Zero Tax bracket?
Cancer must be rooted out at the cellular level. We must take control over the curriculum in schools, the agenda of town councils, State Legislatures and our Federal Government and hold it to what is beneficial to the greater progress of us all. Cancer will eventually kill its host body, but this cancer on our system has the advantage of being able to breed more and deeper poverty faster than they can kill it off, so they will always be allowed to fester.
The cellular level we must battle at starts within each of us. We must examine our biases, our prejudices and really question if what we believe has foundation in fact, or just embedded through false narratives told to us for generations. We must rid ourselves of the toxins that weaken us as individuals and which prevent us from unifying for our greater good.
Our weakness makes us feel helpless and is perpetuated by our biases. Biases that were instilled at Contact to justify the stealing of lands, slaughter and genocides of entire tribes, the breaking of every treaty, and the demonization of those victimized by corruption.
A demonization that was accepted because they weren’t “us”. Well, now they are US. And now the treaties we are breaking are with our international allies, and that is weakening us as a nation. We know Trump is corrupt, and we blame him. But he could do none of this without being carried on the shoulders of those who paved the way for him to rise, and who do nothing to stop him. The entire Republican Party is now corrupt.
I look at Kevin Cramer in North Dakota. A man I thought cared about the most vulnerable children, and he turns his back on children being stolen at the border. At babies being born to refugees in cages, and taken from their mothers, and sold into adoptions with no paperwork to even allow them to know.
When asked what he thought of North Dakota Voters during this time of rampant chaos, he laughed and said that they were too busy trimming their nails. He stays in power because those in his state who vote, couldn’t care less. What the hell is that?
Cancer will kill a body. It will only cripple a nation because the system works to breed more and deeper poverty and deprivation faster than they can kill it off.
The cellular level is voting in every election, regardless of the outcome. You are not voting for which team will win a sporting event, you are voting for the best chance to defeat corruption. You are voting to protect others because that is the only way you can protect yourself.
You are going to get involved in what the schools are teaching and demand it be factual and accurate. And those you elect you will hold accountable for how they vote, and if they vote to protect the wealthy, the powerful at the expense of you and those like you, you are going to vote them out.
Until we actively hold those who are elected accountable to us, we remain powerless. Once it starts, and it has started, it must be maintained. This cancer on the body politic did not happen overnight. It did not happen with just one election being stolen by the Electoral College that ignored the most qualified candidate who got 3 Million more votes than the man they handed it to based on a sketchy 70K vote count in 3 suspicious states instead. It began with the demonization of people that didn’t look like us. It began with the notion that women were not qualified because they only serve as incubators for the seed of men.
A lot of lies were cemented into the preconceptions that made stealing this election, acceptable. And all of it was in service of a system that protects the most corrupt. A system that has been building itself since Nixon who was in fact, a crook.
If you like it, keep it. If you realize that it’s hurting everyone and will make your life less profitable, less secure, more susceptible to violence and the consequences of addictions (yourself, your family, your neighborhood), then you need to do something about it.
If nothing else, I have warned my readers for decades that what was allowed to happen in Indian Country was setting a Federal Precedence that would eventually affect the lives of all of us. It was as ugly as I thought it would be and even uglier in where it’s going than what we can sustain.
Our national position of strength has diminished as we take orders from both Russia and North Korea as to what we are allowed to do and whom we are allowed to make alliances with. The respect we once held, is gone. Our betrayals of other nations, of our stated values, lies in a heap over there and everywhere that we once stood tall, proud and respected.
We are diminished in influence and strength. All because our biases, our prejudices and our installed ignorance, have been played upon by those who master psychological warfare, and who are laughing at us as we battle among ourselves, some to recover our dignity, and others to keep dividing us by race, gender, religion, color, … do we give into that? Or do we wise up?
The cure for our cancer is a drastic awakening. The fog of dreams past beckons us to remain asleep. The cure is to speak up and stand up. It’s happening. But is it enough without all of us?
The United States was founded on Commerce. The colonies were there to exploit resources. A Revolutionary War was fought because we wanted Representation. The Ideal was, that we would also have Justice, a system of fairness and Justice. So far, that just remains a Dream, but dreams do matter. They are important. We can live in our better dreams or our worst nightmares. It would appear that that is up to us, all of us, to wake up and make our best dreams and ideals, realized.
You know where to find me.
~Cat
Reading List:
Task & Purpose, Magazine for, about and by our Military
This ruthless, heartless murderer was given a presidential pardon this week. Ask yourself Why.
Mother Jones Magazine. Well-sourced, informative, reliable
Secretary of Agriculture laughing at farmers who are suffering, losing their farms, committing suicide. "Get a job!" he tells them. Trump Appointees are not appointed for their expertise but rather for their shameful willingness to hurt people.
CNN interview with Kevin Cramer. Over to you, North Dakota!
November 11, 2019
Past Was Prelude Print (6)
The Looking Glass, if you will, has been traversed. We’re there.
Remember, waaaaay back when I was trying to explain how it was to live on the rez, where corruption literally ran every aspect of a person’s life? (Go way back to before I went on a 3 year, some odd, hiatus) and the comparison was if your town was completely run by the mob; the mayor, the cops, and you had nowhere to bring any complaints about corruption, because those in charge, were all corrupt.
To further exacerbate the scene, I told you to imagine that even the judges were corrupt, and only there to serve the mob that installed them. Where would you go? What would you do? How would you survive? By the way, I was pointing out that so many judges in tribal courts were either not qualified by any standard other than a connection to the Tribal Chairperson, and maybe a high school diploma. Not anyone you’d think of as suitable, right?
I explained that these were the circumstances that so many on this rez and so many others, were surviving under. It’s why you don’t call the police. It’s why the tribal courts gave children back to their rapists, even took them away from safe homes, just to punish those who dared speak out and against the corruption.
I also, repeatedly warned, and I know this got ignored, scoffed at and laughed at, that if we didn’t fix the corruption in Indian Country by fixing the corruption at the State and Federal levels that not only enabled and protected it, but enforced it, that it would be a trial run to set precedence on what we were willing to accept happening to ‘them’, which would end up as so many other corrupt practices do, spreading out to beyond the reservation only, and we’d all find ourselves suffering under the same conditions, soon enough.
“We’re all Indians now,” I’d say. I could see the ooze of corruption seeping out from every level, spilling onto our villages, towns, cities and suburbs, even then. Am I psychic? Or did I just see that corruption, evil, nasty corruption, always needs to feed and it feeds on people who can’t or won’t fight back, and I saw we weren’t fighting back. We were standing on the sidelines, watching. It was happening to them, not us.
Well, have you seen the judges that McConnell and the Republicans are stacking the courts with? Several have literally been ruled by the Bar Association in DC, as “Unfit, unqualified” and yet, because they hold the promise of protecting the corrupt from consequences, they are being put on the Bench for Lifetime Appointments.
Judges on the Supreme Court that they would not allow the FBI to investigate. They want the corruption. Why do you think that is? What was the results of trials held before corrupt, inept, unqualified, unfit judges in Indian Country?
And with ICE freely storming into people’s houses, without permission, dragging people off to detention with no cause, just on the presumption that they (because they are not white) are illegal immigrants, having arrested and detained American Citizens several times, not allowing even a phone call, much less an appearance before a judge, and not accepting Identity Papers… just how miserable do you think they can make your life if they decide to do so?
ICE is not screening out rapists, thieves, or other bad actors when they hire. They want abusers. They want to incapacitate us from being able to defend ourselves or even to make a complaint.
When a judge literally has a child in diapers appear without their parents, without an attorney, to plead their Immigration Case, their Asylum Case, and then rules against them, what caliber of judges do we have already? So, seeing a judge is just a formality, and one that can be dispensed with.
Without legitimate courts we don’t have security. We have authoritarian rule.
Without legitimate courts, the police are free to do whatever they want and are not held accountable. It’s happening and it’s spreading, just as fast as the Republicans can get these jerks on the bench.
We have a man in the White House who literally withheld financial aid from one of our most needed allies, because he wanted to pressure him, the President of Ukraine, into cooking up a fake story about Joe Biden, in order to give him (Button Dick) an advantage in the 2020 election. Meanwhile, the very things he was trying cook into an accusation about Joe Biden, he and his friends were also trying to do for themselves: To get in on a deal to run the energy business of Ukraine. Rudy Giuliani has enough mob connections to fill every job.
If you still find Button Dick entertaining, or worse, if you believe anything he’s saying, this is not for you. People just as stupid if not stupider than you, voted him in, and he’s bankrupted them, deported them, betrayed them. He’s betrayed our country, our economy is on the verge of collapse, and our allies no longer trust nor respect us. This is exactly what Russia wants: To defeat the USA without firing a shot. He’s their man.
It was our diversity that made our economy strong. It was the corruption in the system that kept wages down, and taxes higher for the middle class than for the billionaires. But they made you mad at immigrants, and you bought it.
It was our allies that made us strong, in fact, made us a formidable force in the world. It was our NATO Allies that came to our side after 9/11 and fought alongside of us, and took heavy losses for doing it. In all the years that NATO has existed, this is the first and only time it was ever called upon to fight in a war next to anyone, and it was USA that called for help. Now, the next attack won’t have anyone leaping to our aid. Why should they?
We have become the Shithole Country he’s accused other countries of being.
Remember that: Everything he accuses others of doing, are things he is actually guilty of doing.
Everything he takes credit for, is the work someone else did. He lies so much, (it’s in the 10’s of thousands of documented lies now) I’ve lost track. He’s going around taking credit for passing a law that supports Veterans, that was actually passed in 2014 by Obama. It’s not a mistake, it’s a lie. He repeatedly makes false claims that he knows are false, but he likes that his supporters are too dumb to care. He’s there to entertain them, enrich himself, and destroy the greatest country on earth as a favor to Vladimer Putin, and the Oligarchs (Need a Band Name?) to whom he is deeply indebted, to the tune of billions of dollars.
If you don’t mind being sold out, stay stupid.
But if you can see what is happening and you know that even if you are white, and you voted for him, you don’t have immunity from the consequences, you may want to do something about it. You may want to become more politically educated and involved. You may want to take real steps to protecting what’s left, fixing what’s been broken, and making sure that the people we elect are held accountable, from council to president, accountable to you, me, us.
If you don’t want to wake up someday and find someone you loved or cared about was brutally murdered and the murderers were allowed to terrorize your community for decades, and keep on killing, running drugs, etc, with no consequences, then maybe you should take corruption seriously.
Here’s a note: We can’t save ourselves until we tackle the corruption that has been built into the system that we have ignored and left on auto pilot for too many hundreds of years, with a government run, bought and paid for by billionaires and the Corporations that bleed us of our labor and don’t pay taxes.
It all boils down to the Corporations and the hoarders of wealth. They don’t pay fair royalties for the common resources they extract, and in some cases, pay nothing. Oil & Mining companies not only don’t pay royalties, our generous government gives them billions of dollars (they don’t even ask for) as ‘incentive’ to be more successful. That’s our Oil, our Timbers, our minerals being sucked and scraped out of the ground, but it’s all their profits.
That Pipeline is already leaking. And it’s been leaking for months. It hasn’t stopped leaking. It’s killing the aquifer, the biggest aquifer in the USA, right there in the heartland, its gooey, black, stinking filth oozing into every level of water strata, and spreading across the land.
We were warned. But there it is. Those who fought to protect their lands and waters, and by default, our access to clean water, were beaten, assaulted, thrown into prisons and given hundreds of years of sentences while neither the oil companies nor the Pipeline Company will serve a single day behind bars, and their fines will be a pittance, and that’s why corrupt judges are a problem.
When it comes to your farm that can’t be irrigated, your water that can’t be drunk, cooked in, bathed in, and you decide to take legal action, what judges do you think you’ll get? They’re gonna be there for 30-40 years. That oily water will reach most of you by then. You think those judges, those unqualified, unfit judges are going to be your friends? You think they’re gonna protect you? Or care that you’ve suffered losses? (Coyote laugh).
Just a reminder. Today is Remembrance Day/Veterans’ Day. Button Dick, Jr. “wrote” a book (he didn’t write, none of them write their books) and he talks about how the first time he and his family visited Arlington Cemetery after his dad took office, and how it hit him, seeing all those graves of the Men who had died in our wars, reminded him of how much he and his family had sacrificed to help his father succeed.
Yes. You think they care about you? Your sacrifices? Your losses? they see your suffering and your sacrifices as so much less than their own.
That’s what you get when you vote for a mobster. That’s what corruption is. It’s all about them. You are just a joke that cheers the lies at rallies.
Corruption is spreading at an alarming rate. Indians have lived with it since Contact. They know how to survive and it ain’t pretty. Do you? I doubt it. It’s spreading above ground, throughout our system in the same way that crap is spreading from the pipeline into our aquifers. More than one pipeline is leaking, have been leaking, for decades.
The corruption, the pipelines… it’s as though there’s a race above ground and below, for us to be overtaken by the darkest, most vile, most evil elements of unbridled corruption in the pursuit of power and wealth.
We watched it happen in Indian Country. Now, we get a front row seat. Are we just gonna watch? Like it’s some show? Or are we going to gear up and do what has to be done to start setting this right?
Remember: It’s not done until it’s ALL done. As long as corruption is allowed to thrive in Indian Country, as long as there is no justice in Indian Country, that corruption is not gone, it’s just pooling up, waiting to poison us all, again.
We are through the looking glass, as they say. Many of us can’t recognize that it is us, because the mirror is a fun-house mirror, and we keep thinking it’s happening to ‘them’ (points), but realize it’s actually our distorted reflection we are seeing and that’s who we are pointing at. This is us. What’s become of us. What’s left of us.
Our system is supposed to ensure that we don’t resort to violence. In order for that to be true, we have to trust that there is Justice. That part is breaking down. It’s not too late, but we are peering into the abyss. Start looking around. We need alliances, not further division by Race, gender, religion, or any of that crap stuff that works so well on the reactionary types.
Corruption fears strength. There is strength in unity. Find a way.
You know where to find me
~Cat
November 4, 2019
Great White Savior Syndrome -– Print (15)
Yeah. It’s a thing.
Things are bad, really bad on the rez, on every rez, all throughout Indian Country. Some of the best, very best people in the world live and struggle every day on the rez. They love their people, they love their tribe, they love their culture, but they are being drowned in hopelessness and apathy, corruption and bullying, with no way out.
There are people who become aware of this and want to help. Who wouldn’t? The problem arises, or compounds if you will, when the person(s) wanting to ‘help fix this’ have no idea what is broken or how it got broken, and just assume that those suffering and struggling within that vortex, don’t know how to fix it. That it is in fact, their fault. That they did this to themselves. Victim blaming works.
Spoiler: They do know. You have to actually listen to them and understand the system, how it was designed, by whom, for what purposes, to know what part you, me or anyone from the outside can do, should do, or what our role is to play in all this.
Indian People did not break this system. Nor did they build it. Save yourself a lot of scorn and embarrassment of trying to “Whitesplain” it to them, or to anyone.
The system was designed as a part of an overall program of genocide. It remains an ongoing genocide. Hitler based his genocide of Jewish People, on the design, structure and architecture of the Reservation System in the USA. Genocide, mass murder, the slaughter of innocents, the stealing of properties, breaking (literally) every treaty by the government that wrote those treaties, and rendering the people who survive as without Rights, without recourse, without standing in the lands that were and remain theirs, is how you design a system that feeds only on corruption.
That corruption, ultimately, is rooted in greed. That greed is what feeds some of our most massive resource extraction corporations: Oil, Water, Timber, Precious Metals, (all mining, in fact). Those corporations became more wealthy, more powerful and they in essence controlled the government and the Congress that makes the laws that protects their power, prevents them from being investigated for their crimes, issues paltry fines for their massive transgressions…
Those same corporations lobby for and gain more loopholes and tax breaks for themselves, every single year. They pay no taxes, most of them, and in the case of Oil Companies, one of the most profitable of all Corporations, for some reason our Federal government feels they must give them an additional $80-300B of our tax dollars in the form of ‘grants’, to ‘encourage them to do more and better’.
I repeat: Corporation that makes over a trillion dollars in profit, at home and abroad, pays little or no taxes, gets billions as an “incentive” without even asking for it, applying for it, while alternative clean energy businesses receive a fraction of their operating costs, or nothing at all, and have to jump through a series of hoops in order to even apply.
The goal, obviously, is to prevent alternative clean energy from taking away our need for the most toxic , most damaging forms of energy. Alternative energy, would if subsidized even a fraction of what BIG OIL is currently, would make it more affordable in our lives, and make us as a nation, more energy independent, our air, water, land less polluted, less toxic.
Meanwhile, we’re paying Oil Companies to pollute, spill, and do further harm with no consequences or accountability. (Wait until you get to the part about the Pipeline spill)
NOTE: If we became less reliant on Big Oil, those wars in the Middle East would become less worth fighting. Currently, Trump has abandoned our greatest allies, the Kurds, smeared them as being “worse than ISIS”, and instead, deployed troops to guard the oilfields. Oil, btw, that we will not get, but which Russia will pump out. Who’s he working for? Not us. Not our Allies. Not our best interests. But you be you, over there, in the red hat, snorting.
Rapid Transit is an orphan because it would diminish our need for Oil. Other countries have highspeed rail and have had it for decades. We remain 100 years behind, not because we don’t have the technology, but because Oil Companies want us enslaved.
The Iraq wars, both of them, were started for the Oil Companies. The lies that got us into those wars, IMO, should be considered a high crime. But it’s clear now: Abandoning our allies, who lost over 11,000 of their soldiers fighting on our behalf, then we go protect the oil fields so Russia and Saudi Arabia can have it is how stupid we are at this point. Don’t worry, we haven’t hit bottom. It’s coming.
Key to this misery, key to this costing us tens of trillions of dollars with no end in sight, is keeping us dependent on Oil Companies, and not holding oil companies accountable for the damages they do and not taxing them on the profits they make.
Oil Companies ripped off every tribe in Indian Country, for decades (and they still are), by not paying for the royalties they owed for the oil they removed from their lands.
Nobody fought for the Indians except the Indians and they had to fight using their own money against a mega corporation with billions of our dollars in their pockets, and it took decades. Indians won. Over ten years ago!
But not a dime has reached any of the members of any tribe, which remain with many of their people, in grinding poverty. A few in luxury, with little ‘in between’. Choices you make determine if you eat healthy food, can go out and dance, have a roof over your head that doesn’t leak, have heat in the winter, etc., and that depends on who you are friends with that hold power. That’s it.
WE, and by “WE”, I mean White Government, White Systemic Racism, allowed this. Now, our men and women are dying over there, oil companies reaping all the rewards. So, you think letting the Oil Companies get away with the abuses in Indian Country were worth it? Can you not connect the dots to your own suffering by virtue of the policies and practices of our Federal and State governments?
Keeping the general population stupid, unenlightened of what actually goes on, feeding us glossy ads promoting their “green-ness”, and “clean-ness” is part of that. Our buying into it is the bigger part.
That’s just one company, one product.
The Lies That Blind Us
We buy into the lies that blind us because we want to. In some ways, we know that we have to, or we will have to face all the lies we were sold and bought into, for generations.
The history we were taught in school, was false. It left out our betrayals, our theft, our slaughters of the innocent. It starts with those school plays about “The First Thanksgiving”. Folks, that is totally made up. It never happened. Most of what we were taught was so altered, so warped, they were more fiction than fact. Heroes were fabricated where incompetent jerks really stood. This fiction is what shaped our notion of who we are. It’s going to be shattering to face the lies as lies. Not everyone will have the strength or fortitude to comprehend it.
We are raised on a constant stream of propaganda, we accept it as if it is fact, and when actual facts step in to correct the misconceptions, people by nature, not wanting to feel like the fool for believing the propaganda, the lies, the myths, will fight like hell, threaten violence to anyone, everyone bringing facts that crush their beliefs.
They summon a level of anger that they think makes them powerful, in order to maintain their hold on the lies that made them feel superior. In this way, anything that argues for Equality is seen as a threat to those whose only confidence comes from feeling superior.
Those people seldom look in a mirror in a comparative frame of mind. They see what they want to see, what they must see, in order to feel “safe” in their puddle of ignorance.
That’s the beauty of lies. It weakens the person being fed lies so that they can’t accept anything that isn’t a lie. We adapt to the poison even as it is killing us. We fear not having the lies because without them, we’d feel naked in our crimes.
We are taught that the Quakers fled England and came here to practice freedom of religion. Nope. We were not established as colonies for Freedom of anything. That may be why the Quakers came here, but it was not the predicate for the Colonies.
Explorers, on behalf of kingdoms, found abundant resources here. England, France, Germany, all vied for colonizing the region for two purposes only: Trading in goods, and expanding their empires. Period.
Exporting furs, gold, rare in Europe, abundant on Turtle Island, and claiming that massive territory for the Kings & Queens who sponsored the voyages. The Church wanted to spread their influence to every corner because if any territory was not claimed by their religion, the future could see rebellion against their doctrine. Must brainwash everyone, everywhere. Rule the World.
The Vatican did not get all that wealth from nothing, they got it from robbing the poor, the peasants, the Indigenous People in lands near and far.
Columbus wanted glory and wealth, but he had to be financed by a kingdom (queendom if you will), and that wouldn’t happen without the Church getting a piece of it. The Church had as much if not more wealth than the kingdoms they co-existed with. Ever since Charlemagne, the Popes have been the defacto Kingmakers. You can not be Royalty without their blessing. For that, you must pay and you must play.
The Church had to make a ‘moral claim’ and to do that, they had to condemn the Indigenous People as ‘Savages’, and therefore Not Human, to justify both the Church and the Kingdoms’ claims to their lands. Atrocities followed. Crimes against Humanity were in fact, a chosen method of the Church. Some “god”, eh?
So powerful, every atrocity was allowed, no one questioned any of it. Power was in being able to rob, torture, maim, kill humans for not believing in your power.
Call it “God”. They still do. Questions are still seen as blasphemy. Power so great it cannot stand up to the questions of a small child.
The slaughter, torture, abuses of First Nations People was epic, and it remains ongoing. People blame Columbus for all that. I blame the Church. Columbus did nothing to protect the Indigenous People, but the Church has never stopped torturing and killing them and then blaming them for the poverty inflicted on them by those the Church protects.
No school will teach our children about the genocide of Indian People. The content is too brutal. All the way up into the 70’s residential schools were punishing Indians and trying to destroy their family, cultural bonds, sense of self, dignity and to break the spirits of every child in their care. We feed them stories of Pilgrims and First Thanksgiving instead. Those broken bodies in unmarked graves? Don’t ask.
Churches and their abuses didn’t come to light until this century, and the mea culpa parades began… but I suspect they admit their guilt without admitting or allowing the details of that guilt to surface in the minds of the Public. We would overthrow the Churches, toss them out like vermin, if the Public actually knew and understood the depths and duration of the abuse under the pretense of “saving souls”.
The casual rape, abuse, beatings of children, thousands and hundreds thousands of them who were killed in residential schools or died trying to escape back to home, thousands of miles away, did not see a single nun or priest punished. Not even ONE.
What Price?
Churches pay compensation. How do you compensate for killing children? Why are you allowed to exist as an object of moral light, given that you obtained your power by cruelty, rape, murder and theft of children? You have to prove what they did to you, and that’s near impossible because the church kept those records, destroyed those records. What do you have to prove that at the age of 7 you were sexually abused by priests and nuns?
We allowed this. Those who knew, kept us from hearing about it. Those who didn’t know, and that’s most of us, became apathetic accomplices. Our silence, our support for the government and the churches that instigated this abuse, was us supporting it. We should be angry at the government and the Church, but instead, we attack the victims, and tell them that their distress is of their own making. We see ridicule of their culture and tell them to get over it.
For any of us to now stand up and say: “Let me tell YOU how to fix YOUR problem” is wrong. It’s us wrapping ourselves in a cape of savior, without us even looking at the root of the problem, the corruption, and the system that protects that corruption. Our part in that system.
You want to save Indian People? Save yourself first. Start weeding out, exposing and unraveling the corruption. Expose those who gained their wealth and power through the systematic series of wrongs done to both Indigenous People and to Black People.
Just because the corrupt have kept power and their families have become powerful, doesn’t mean we owe it to them to protect them. I don’t care how much charity they donate to, they do it for tax write offs and good PR so that the unwashed masses (we) won’t rise up and dispossess them from their mansions and estates.
NOTE: Jeffrey Epstein walked among them, was lauded by them, and they knew of the accusations, many participated. When he was brought down by the strength of his victims, not by our government which never protected the victims, he was murdered in his cell.
You hear people say “Eat the Rich”, but what you don’t realize is that if they feel they will be exposed, they will eat their own to protect themselves. Someone with more power than Epstein ordered him silenced. If you let the story end by believing he committed suicide while the autopsy shows the many broken bones in his neck were indicative of murder, then you choose to fed lies. You prefer lies. Lies are easier to swallow. You’ve swallowed too many already. He was a bad guy, so who cares who had him killed? HINT: Bigger, Badder Guys.
Back To The Beginning
From Inception, our country was founded on theft, corporate greed, and betrayal. We can’t change history, but we can change the future by learning a more accurate version of what actually transpired back in the day, and what is going on today.
We are paying the price, we just don’t know it. Our soldiers are dying over there, over here, and living on the streets. We are paying in ways we don’t know how to calculate, but we should learn if we want to save ourselves.
The difference between us and everyone on every rez? People on the Rez KNOW of the betrayals, and the costs of corruption. They live it every day. It’s happening to us and has been for generations, but in a slower, more insidious pace, allowing us to believe the lies, and to lie to ourselves. “Here are the lies you must eat. If we are not here to feed them to you, here are the ingredients and the recipe for you to make your own, and to consume them, and to feed them to your children.”
Present Day
All we have to do, is begin to stop lying to ourselves. If we pursue corruption, root it out at every level, we will fix ourselves, and guess what? We’ll find that these tribes suddenly have more control over their own destiny, and can root out the tribal corruption because there will be no State, Federal system to protect the corrupt in their midst.
If we disempower corruption, we save our country. If we protect corruption, we fail to protect ourselves. It’s becoming more obvious all the time.
I’ve spent decades painting the wrongs in one reservation, Spirit Lake Nation, centered around the epitome of corruption: The Murder of Eddie Peltier, and the cover up that betrayed the entire tribe, with the frame up of 11 innocent young men for a crime they had no part in. All the while it was obvious that the guilty got away with this because the Federal and State government was corrupt and assisted the guilty at the expense of the innocent.
That system remains intact. It’s time to unravel it. It’s time to expose it. Because it’s not just one Tribe, it’s the entirety of Indian Country. It’s not just Indian Country, it’s everywhere. Every-f’g-where.
Paint a picture as you will of any tribe, anywhere, and show the broken, the suffering and the violence, but know they didn’t get that way on their own. We. Did.That.To.Them.
Ignorance saves no one. Want to ‘save the Indians’? Look in the mirror.
Know this one thing above all else as you see the stereo types of Indians portrayed as either violent, abusive addicts & alcoholics; or as Noble, stoic, types: Throughout our history, since Contact, despite the ongoing genocide, despite the ignorance and lies that covered the crimes of Corporations and Federal, State Governments, Indians still stand. They are not gone. They have survived the worst that Humans can do to other Humans.
What you see that is broken, we broke that. We owe that person, that family, that community, our assistance.
Who have I met on reservations and from different tribes? The best. The strongest. The bravest Humans who have, like our allies, risked and lost their lives to try and get the Truth out there, and we OWE them.
No one is without flaws. No one is without some shameful episode in their own family. But know that stepping forward and out of that to tell the truth is an act of courage few can grasp because so few have ever summoned the strength on that level, ever. Honor that. It matters that you recognize it.
Start listening to them tell their own stories. Listen. That’s the very least you and I can do. Listen.
The next thing we can do is defend them and their lands from the continuing damage of exploitive Corporations. Protect their Rights to Protect their Lands and to Protect their future. Their future is OUR future. Their present is our Future. Don’t fix them, fix US!
When you realize that two women who protested, peacefully and unarmed, the pipeline that is a threat to their tribal lands, just received sentences of over 100 years each, you must KNOW the system is broken.
That pipeline has now ruptured, spilling millions of gallons of bitumen into the aquifer the protesters were trying to protect. That aquifer is the largest single source of drinking water for the entire Midwest. The protesters get 100+ year sentences, but those who literally just killed the water supply for 15 states will get a fine. They will fight that fine. For years. No one will go to jail because of what they did. Only those who tried to save us will do time in prison.
We are told it’s only 383,000 gallons. As if that in itself is not a huge warning. But the truth is that the oil companies never tell the truth about their spills. It takes much longer for the truth to come out. They are gauging the amount based on what is visible on the surface…. But bitumen does not float. What is on the surface is a fraction of what is in fact, below the ground, seeping into every cranny of that aquifer. In the case of oil spills, it’s what you don’t see, that will kill you. For that oil to rise to the surface requires 100’s even a thousands of times more oil (bitumen) beneath it.
There is no technology available to clean up oil spills completely, and none to clean up bitumen at all.
Those Oil Company execs, their Koch Brothers, will be courted by republicans and some democrats, because their money is power. They should be shamed, shunned and jailed, but they will be sought out instead, as political kingmakers.
The super wealthy will be able to move away, protect their families. Maybe move to another country. The rest of us will be trapped in communities where cancers and other diseases will sharply rise; where animals will sicken & die, where crops will fail, and the government will pretend they don’t know why.
Decades from now, when the truth comes out, the wealthiest who profited off of this misery that will last until the end of time, will declare there was no way to foresee the pipeline’s failure… except, there was, because of the failure of the other pipeline, at the border of North and South Dakota… that also spilled millions of gallons of oil years before… and has never been cleaned up.
Bulldozers violated court orders and tore through sacred burial grounds, no problem. The laws don’t apply to corporations. Corporations got local racist police enforcement to attack the protesters with water cannons, LRADs, tear gas, and the military to sweep them out of their camps. Tactics were brutal. Vicious. It takes a special kind of ugly Human to want to do that, or to obey orders to do that.
Two women protesters, I remind you, drew sentences of over 100 years for trying to prevent the damage that is now in process. Oil Companies and the Pipeline companies only take profits, they don’t shoulder responsibility. Who should be in jail? People defending their own lands? Or those poisoning it?
They did this damage in Indian Country, but that aquifer feeds 15 states. You think you’re not going to be affected? You think your kids won’t get sick from cancers and diseases that can’t be cured? You think the government is going to protect YOU?
Farms and ranches in those states provide most of our meats, grains and sugars. Breadbasket. Help yourself!
This happened in the heart of the USA. The Heart has now been poisoned. Ooopsie.
But, will you protest? No. You were told that those raggedy ass Indians were standing in the way of “Progress”, and you believed that. You cheered when they got brought down.
You can’t admit it, but I will tell you, you signed your own death warrant with your racism. Maybe you’ll get old and die because you’re already half-way there, but it won’t be long before children in the Midwest are considered middle-aged at 10, because so many will die before they reach 20.
Meanwhile, their hospital bills are going to bankrupt you. But don’t worry, you’ll get mad at the people who tried to prevent it, and you’ll get mad at the people trying to fix it if they ever get the chance, because your anger has been misdirected for so long, you act out where you are pointed, instead of where the source of your misery rests so comfortably, at the dinners and secret fundraisers of your Republican Party.
Democrats don’t take money from Big Oil. Don’t try to point out the small donors who are laborers in the industry, they are not the multi-billion dollar dark money PACs. They are not the FAT CATS. The Republican SCOTUS with a warped reading of our Constitution, rendered us all helpless with their Citizens United Ruling that said Corporations were entitled to free speech, and if we limited how much money they could donate to a candidate or party, we were hurting their free speech.
Those same justices now hobnob with the very captains of industry who have cases pending against them in Supreme Court. Openly consorting with one party, and you. Expect a fair ruling? If I could, I’d laugh.
Money is speech. How much do you have?
Corporations are people when it comes to politics, but they remain shielded from responsibility when it comes to the damage they do in pursuit of those profits. That’s your “Conservative” Judges. They protect corporations over people. Now, drink to that, but not the water.
Conservatives have brainwashed you, through talk radio (which they own) and FOX media, which they own, that your anger should be directed at anyone that tries to stop them. And you’ve gone along with it all this time. All (98%). media is owned by 6 Major Corporations, all owned & run by Conservative White Men. Media that is independent goes begging for your dollars. The poison is free. The Truth is starving.
Unable to admit you were lied to and that your votes have created the damage being done and the worst that is coming, you’ll put on your red hat, fire up your flat bed and parade through town with your Trump signs and declare yourself too stupid to care what comes next.
Turns out that “MAGA” is a Nigerian word for “stupid, easily fooled, idiot.” Who knew?
Have you seen the votes of your senators and your congressmen? Have you taken a good look at who is buying them?
Stay divided, stay weakened, stay misdirected in your anger. That’s how Russia wants us. Every Republican has failed to show up at the hearings despite being on the committees, because they don’t want to hear the truth, because that will make it harder for them to defend the criminal who’s being impeached.
They literally have to stay ignorant, and convince you that they are being denied access, when in fact, they refuse to attend those very hearings. They’re too stupid and too lazy to get a real job. They just have to make sure they keep you stupid enough to keep voting for them so they can keep protecting criminals who are killing your kids.
“The First Step To Solving a Problem is To Admit there’s a Problem.”
They’re clowns. They have buzzwords to trigger you. And you’re too proud to admit you’ve been lied to. You believe them because you want to. You’re afraid not to, even as your children drink poisoned water. Even as crops will be watered, and livestock watered… it will spread throughout the land above as it spreads throughout the aquifers below. It can’t be stopped. You can’t move away from it. And you can’t admit it.
You can’t even take the first step. You’re that weak. Just the way they want you. If you loved anyone, especially your family, you’d find a way. You’d find the courage. You’d take that first step.
But you’re too weak. You’d direct your anger in the right direction, to the source of your misery, those who lied to you all these years. (But you crave that poison. You even have favorites who deliver it. You’re addicted to the poison).
You’d find a way to organize and take political action to begin the long road of rectifying the injustices you never realized would end up at your door. (But you can’t because you spent your whole life believing *they* were takers, they were lazy, they were your enemy… you couldn’t see them as they are, or even as they could be, because you were taught to believe you were better than they…so that made them the enemy you feared, while the real danger pretended to be your friend, your ally, your voice in government…
How do you change course? How do you stop drinking the poison? You know you’ll lose friends over this. Friends who still drink the poison and can only be around others who reinforce that it’s good to drink that poison… because they feel so powerful when they drink that poison. Powerful when in the crowd where everyone is drunk on that poison…
The Truth will set you free, but you’ll have to find and make new friends. Your old ones only want the poison. You become their enemy. “You think you’re too good for us?” “You think you’re better than us?” and “Who do you think you are, anyway?”
To that last one, you should answer: “I’m not sure, but I’m going to find out. I’m real sure I’m not this poison drinker anymore.”
Geez, that sounds like a form of rehab where the client has to learn to stand up for themselves, care enough about themselves to make the kinds of changes that save their lives: Give up alcohol, drugs, and not be around those who partake in those poisons… but in this case, it’s the lie about what Conservatism really is, and what the people fighting for you really are.
Our nation needs rehab. But the dealers are running it. Vote them out. Vote for Justice, not greed. Vote for truth, not ignorance. Show them who you are. Show yourself. Show your children. Give them a chance. The Chance you never had.
Not The Same
Both Parties are not the same. Repeat: They are not the same. One has to lie to you about what is going on. The other has to show you the truth in a way that makes you understand it and not be afraid of it. One makes you feel powerful when you are drunk on it, and with a lot of other raging idiots also drunk on it, and the other shows you the damage being done and the hard work that has to be done to stop it.
The Truth is scary, but it’s our only way out of this mess. It’s the only way to hold accountable those who have done the real damage. Get mad when you are lied to. Get mad that those lies were just to make you blind angry at all the wrong people.
Get mad at the liars. And then do something about it. Vote them out. And get involved in the process of your government. Don’t just vote and think you’re done…stay educated and active. Show up for townhalls, and ask questions, and expect the truth. Hold the elected accountable.
Oh, our national debt has gone up another $3 trillion dollars since last April. Just thought you’d like to know. Those tax cuts to billionaires are costing us. McConnell says to pay for it, he has to get Medicare and Social Security cut down to nothing. The poor must pay for the rich. That’s how Conservatives work these past 40 years. But they tell you they’re saving babies, cutting taxes. It just costs you more. You get mad at Dems, right? LOL. Shake your fists at the elderly? The sick? Yeah, that’s the power! *Coyote rolls in the dead leaves, laughing*
They wave their hand in front of your face, say “Boo!” and steal your wallet, but tell you that it was the ghost that took it. Didn’t you hear the “Boo”? The “Boo!” was the important part. Aren’t you paying attention? Now, back to our story…
Duck & Cover?
There is no drill for little kids to practice to avoid the deadly effects of poisoned water. They will drink it, they will bathe in it, and their clothes will be washed in it. Their food will be raised in in. Bullets, sponsored by the NRA (funded by Russia), and poisoned water sponsored by Big Oil and the Pipeline. Yeah, Progress. Lots and lots of progress. Those silly protesters! Trying to stop progress.
Congrats North Dakota. You got your Pipeline. Your judges sure are showing those protesters whose boss! Broken Treaties were just the beginning. It’s not just Indians anymore. Its you, me, our kids and grandkids.
We are not the heroes that we think we were or are. We are the ones who have benefited from the wrongs done to righteous, honest people. We benefited from not being the victims, even though now, with the wars from Viet Nam to the Middle East, we are losing our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters to enrich Oil and Mining Resource Extraction Corporations, who have wrapped their greed in the American Flag, and portrayed us as heroes, just so we can’t see that we too, are being robbed of our future, our families. That cape covers our eyes. Cute, eh?
Racism has been used to keep us from seeing each other as we are, keeping us divided by ignorance, and keeping us in bite-size pieces so they can more easily manipulate us. The brainwashing by FOX on our friends and relatives has created a mistrust and widened the divide.
Playing on our sense of helplessness to make us feel we must have AR-15 weapons or we are powerless, is how they keep us powerless. It’s how they keep our children terrorized.
I went to school learning “Duck and Cover” in case the A-Bomb came to my town. Children in preschool are learning to hide in terror of a mass shooter coming into their school.
The A-Bomb never got dropped on my town. I was never traumatized by that. But children are terrorized every day by the news of another mass shooting, while those who want to keep us fearful tell us that we must allow everyone, even those whom we know are a threat to our safety or their own, to have an AR-15.
They cover that by saying that if they take away a gun that was not designed for domestic use, but rather for the battlefield, that hunters will lose their guns, citizens will lose their side arms, because the AR-15 is somehow, all guns. People unskilled in simple logic, buy into this because it’s said with a straight face.
Stupid people buy into this. People who were made stupid by curriculum that lied to them since childhood and a Network run by a corporation that pays no taxes, needs to take more of our money so they can get richer and more powerful. They dread that someday we will wise up.
The drone from FOX is reinforced by those in the Republican Party who echo it, and by media who only focuses on the Wingers who still support Trump, as if theirs is the only opinion that matters. It isn’t. It never was. He lost the popular vote, and his presidency is illegitimate and he knows it. That’s why he’s trying to blackmail Ukraine into smearing his political opponent. He needs to cheat to win. It’s how he ‘won’ last time, while losing by more than 3 Million votes.
Republicans know this. But they only want power. They play to every lie you’ve ever been told. They play to every fear you’ve ever had regarding someone not white as you. They divide us by gender saying women are less important than pregnancy. Women are only incubators. Weaken women, you weaken society.
There’s a lot of places to start.
What’s stopping you?
You know where to find me.
~Cat
Reading List:
The Mueller Report, Secret Memos, Buzzfeed. << Very reliable.
"Uprooted", the 1950's Plan to erase Indians APM Reports. Comes with video
Trump Jr., now tied to to Banker Behind Russian Money Laundering Scheme. Ties up a lot of loose ends.
The Difference between a Ball Game and a Political Rally. From Twitter
Want to know who profits from those Economic Zone Tax Breaks and why it isn't you?
Federal Deficit Increast to $985 Billion (Note: Federal Debt increased by $3 T in the last 7 months. That's a different barrel of monkeying around with our money.